Written by Well, sorry, I made up a word. But trails can, in fact, be awesome, lineal features that lie on, and sometimes above, the ground, and humans have been utilizing them for nearly every purpose under the sun since “time immemorial”–as my Northwest native friends might say. We’ve walked, run or ridden them to find food, water, clothes, shelter and each other for about as long as we’ve been upright.
Some paths were just our own tracks in the sand, snow, leaves or sopping muck that others might follow and further imprint into the landscape. Or maybe we partially cleared a corridor in the wilderness from the sticks, branches, thorns and rocks that impeded our progress, thereby creating a lineal track that remained visible to others who happened by. Wildlife might have followed our trails too, and we theirs.
When we were feeling especially industrious, we might have excavated some of the dirt and crud from the face of a steep slope, busted through the deadfallen trees, or tossed a log over a stream to create a bridge to further ease the way. Again, if others followed, a trail would emerge from the ethereal chaos of wilderness.
And lo, we decided that trails were good. More than that, trails were cool. Blessed be the trails.
Then came agriculture, the Rennaissance, Industrial Revolution, Space Age, the Internet and all that other practical stuff. More importantly came the invention of specialized trail-building implements like the McCleod and Pulaski in the the early 1900s.
Originally designed for combating forest fires, these popular handtools quickly found a home in the trail-building world as well. And let us not forget the cutter-mattock, a precursor to the Pulaski and very useful trail-constructing implement that dates back to the Byzantine and even ancient Mesopotamia. We can apparently credit Enlil, the god of wind, air, earth and storms for that spectacular, civilization-enabling device.
Things have evolved somewhat since then, as you might guess. To reduce grumpiness and general irritability among trail builders, electric and petroleum-powered machines are often seen doing a lot of the major grunt work for us, while a little dynamite is poked in holes here and there to remove the rockiest obstructions. But those handy-as-ever, century-old (and older) trail tools, the McLeod, Pulaski, cutter-mattock, and many others, still remain as versatile and useful as a traveler’s coffee mug. I suspect they’ll be sticking around at least as long as spoons, forks and mugs.
What’s evolved most, however, in the past century or more, is the science of trail-building. I’ll try to illustrate some of that in future posts, as we take a look at the endless examples of real-world trails and the more creative, and frankly, beautiful design solutions that have materialized through the art of the trail.
–Ken W.